Monday, 10 June 2013

I can’t remember why I’d decided it would be a good idea,
but four days after turning up in London, my birding instincts kicked in. A
screech from the sky: I instinctively looked up and through the deep blue sky sailed a
parakeet.

Four days. That was as long as I could not look up, as long
as I could go without birds. Before I had disregarded the Ring-necked Parakeets
of suburban London as much as I had the city itself: a ghastly, unnatural
place, with very few redeeming features. I still feel the same way towards the
city. It’s a hot and horrible place of seething streets and airless spaces and
good jobs that pay well. For a country boy these things are particularly hard
to adjust to.

But something changed. It wasn’t that exact parakeet, it
merely teed up the one that did. Two stultifying days later, the atmosphere was
dense and the scent of traffic fumes inescapable. That was when I found it.
After a sweaty day of flat viewing across the city, it was perched in a tree
outside the house I’m currently, gratefully, staying at. Sitting flush to the
branch, the long tail made more sense than it does wobbling through the sky.
But it was the turquoise sheen – a colour I didn’t expect and couldn’t place on
prior parakeets – that took me by surprise. It was the colour of the sky and
sycamore leaves painted on to the exotic bird sat above me. It was that what
made me see it for the jewel like bird it is. One that could not be more
strangely appropriate for London.

So why had I been ignoring it? I think birders, myself
included, can be too hung up on the purity, the naturalness, of nature. That is
its own small unquestioned absurdity. Nature in the pristine, untouched sense
doesn’t really exist. Dig deep enough and you’ll find an artificial element in
its history, in any history. Birds for me are the most visible, joyous example
of nature as it now is. Free, yet altered in most possible ways by human
influence. Kept in a cage they are just animals. When the cage blows over, and
they flex their wings and fly as they would anywhere is when they become nature
for me. The lingering sense of dislike – that category C sniffiness – does
nothing any favours at all, not the bird or the person. So you might as well
celebrate it; at the very least acknowledge it.

Saturday, 1 June 2013

6AM. I couldn’t tell if the shiver that ran through me was
from tiredness or chill. For the first of June, this was a pitifully grey
morning. Through the murk Lakenheath Fen sang with a cacophony of Reed
Warblers, Cetti’s Warblers and Cuckoo echoing through the stands of poplar
trees. Colour was sapped from the scene but summer’s deep vegetation wafted
through a fragrant reminder of the season. We walked west on the track that runs
through the waist-high marsh before abruptly stopping at west wood. The song of
a Locustella warbler filled the air.

I hadn’t done my research, I’ll admit that now. If I had I’d
probably have recognised that this wasn’t the song of a Savi’s Warbler, our
target, and that the real twitch was about 200 metres further down the track.
But I was lazy last night, the car park was pretty empty and here was a small
knot of people looking through scopes. There was a whisper of Savi’s and
confused directions were in the air. I get offered a look through a scope ‘at
the bird’: a dark Locustella warbler
singing from a reed-head on a nearby bank. And now excitement was in the air.

Locustella warblers
all sing with a variation upon a drily unmelodic, insect-like churr. They don’t
sing in repeated phrases but two quick notes, repeated with mechanical speed
and frequency, ceaselessly for minutes on end. It’s an uncanny dirge because
they rotate their heads whilst they sing, thus ‘throwing’ the song and making
it incredibly difficult to pick out which patch of reeds or bush the sound is
coming from. In the poor light we could make out a dark Locustella, throwing a song that sounded wrong. I find it hard to
recognise species by song but I can tell what’s different and this didn’t sound
typical to me. The other birders were very happy by this point. As the light
improved it flitted from bush to bush before stepping up for staggering views
as it sung. Facing us, we could make out the dirty brown but plain underparts,
and the wide open bill from which the torrent of noise flooded out. And then it
flitted around and showed a dirty brown streaked back.

The crowd’s assumption was still Savi’s. No dissenting
words, so I whisper to dad: ‘I thought they were unstreaked…’ and curse my lack
of preparation, assuming I’m in the wrong. Other birders drift off, happy with
their Savi’s. I resort to googling from my phone to have my suspicions
confirmed: we’d been had. At the same time a photographer ambles down the track
and tells us that the Savi’s is actually about two hundred metres further on…

It was half seven by the time we’d found the actual twitch.
It was fully light by now but our early morning advantage was gone – from here
I expected the bird to get less active, the light worse and the crowd to swell,
but after about fifteen minutes of Reed Warbler false alarms, a different Locustella song emerges from the reeds. Not
long after, shimmying up a reed-head was the singing warbler. The position was the same as the Grasshopper Warbler before but
in large. The bill catches attention first for appearing to be drawn on in
marker pen: big, thick and black. It’s a style that seems to influence the
whole cartoon Reed Warbler appearance of the Savi’s Warbler: bigger, thicker,
darker. It sang for a minute before descending back into the depths of the
reedbed. It’s quite hard to imagine how anyone could confuse a Grasshopper
Warbler for it, but it’s been proven many times how hard it is to look with an
open mind after you’ve been told you’ve found what you were looking for.

We didn’t see the Savi’s again: we could only cope with
fifteen minutes more in the company of the crowd, in which time we manage to
see three Bitterns have a hormonally-charged chase high over the reedbed. We
traipse around the rest of the quiet reserve. A Cuckoo flew over: all lanky
limbs and elastic wingbeats, and a handful of Swifts hurtled low over the cold
reserve. By the time we’d walked around the riverbank back to the beginning of
the reserve trails, we’d still not seen a Barn Owl.

‘As if we’ve not seen a Barn Owl’, I said.

‘Where’s the Barn Owl?’ replied dad, furrowed brow.

‘We’ve not seen one’, I say.

‘Oh.’

I raise my binoculars. Quartering the other side of the
river was a Barn Owl as white as the sky.